Making Love : Sentiment and Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century British Literature

Making Love closely reexamines the literary history of sentimentalism in order to open up new ways of understanding the history of sexuality. Paul Kelleher argues that British sentimental authors in the eighteenth century imagine heterosexual desire and conjugal love as forms of moral sensibility; this ideological vision, in which heterosexuality is equated with sympathy, benevolence, and moral goodness, persists to this day and informs contemporary debates regarding sexual ethics and same-sex marriage and adoption.